Re: RLBackup - one year update

I've been using this excellent script for over a year now to back up my entire system, including Ubuntu 10.04 as a host for VirtualBox and two Windows virtual machines. I've had a few problems, and found simple solutions, so I thought I would pass these on and hopefully save someone else a major expense.

The costly problem is my backup drive needed to be replaced, and the link tree which holds all the backups could not be copied to the new drive. The guy at the computer shop said his cloning program (Acronis) saw 90 million files, ran all weekend, and eventually gave up. The unix cp command has the same problem. It creates a separate copy for each link in the tree. After a few hours of futile effort, he gave up, thinking the problem was bad sectors and a corruption of the filesystem.

The solution is to use the command "rsync -aHr". The H option preserves the hard-links.

The second problem happened when I added virtual machines to my setup. VirtualBox keeps these virtual machines in huge files on the host system. RLBackup copies the entire file anytime there is a small change to any file within the VM. The solution I'm using is to exclude the VM files from the backup, and just run a separate backup utility within each virtual machine. I'm using Mozy because it is free while the total backup is less than 2GB, and they don't seem to mind that I have a separate free account for my Windows 7 VM. I don't feel like I am cheating here, because I have a paid account which would easily store the entire system if it could avoid copying the entire VM for every little change.

Re: RLBackup - one year update

Originally Posted by david.macquigg

The guy at the computer shop said his cloning program (Acronis) saw 90 million files, ran all weekend, and eventually gave up. The unix cp command has the same problem. It creates a separate copy for each link in the tree. After a few hours of futile effort, he gave up, thinking the problem was bad sectors and a corruption of the filesystem.

The solution is to use the command "rsync -aHr". The H option preserves the hard-links.

su asks for the password of the user "root".
sudo asks for your own password (and also checks if you're allowed to run commands as root, which is configured through /etc/sudoers -- by default all user accounts that belong to the "admin" group are allowed to use sudo).
sudo -s launches a shell as root, but doesn't change your working directory.
sudo -i simulates a login into the root account: your working directory will be /root, and root's .profile etc. will be sourced as if on login.

Re: RLBackup (Rsync Local Backup). An easy way to backup your system

Just had a HDD fail and the most recent backup through our offsite was several days ago so I'm trying to develop a sensible local back up system to avoid a similar situation.

Yours looks like a very nice one but I'm wondering if I'll have any issues if I use your script as a cron script (i.e. put it in /etc/cron.daily). I'm also wondering if there's an easy way to have it automatically remove older back ups once the total size of the back ups reaches a particular size. I don't want to have to remember to run the script nor clean out old back ups.